“Yes—it distracted me from my work a little,” admitted Ruth. “Why, you’ve almost got a finished sketch,” she continued, looking at Dorothy’s board.

“I always work fast,” admitted Dorothy, “but I’ll do it all over again a dozen times before the week is finished.”

“I wonder how she happened to take up art,” said Ruth, nodding toward the broad back of the fat lady with the dyed hair.

“Oh, she’s—she’s just one of the perpetual students—they say she’s been coming here for ten years—didn’t they have any perpetual students where you came from? But perhaps this is your first year?”

“No, I studied a year in the Indianapolis Art School and we didn’t have any perpetual art students. Is the one with grey hair a perpetual student, too?”

“Yes; we had one, a man too, in San Francisco where I came from.”

30“Why do they do it? Isn’t it rather pitiful, or are they rich women with a fad?”

30

“No, indeed, they’re not rich. I never heard of a perpetual student who was rich. Why, Camille De Muth, the fat one, sometimes has to pose in the portrait class to earn money to pay for her life.”

“How does she live?” asked Ruth.

“Dear Lord, as well ask me why is an art student as how does one live—how do any of us live, except of course the lucky ones with an allowance from home?”

All the time she was talking, Dorothy Winslow was moving her hands, defying all the laws of physiology by bending her long fingers back over the tops of them, and by throwing one white thumb out of joint.

“But you haven’t told me why they do it—why they keep on studying year after year. Don’t they try to make any use of what they’ve learned?”

“Not that I ever heard of—they’re just—just art artists. They spend their lives in class and at exhibitions, but I’ve never tried to understand them—too busy trying to understand myself.”

“What do they do when they’re not here?” asked Ruth.

“They spend their leisure in the cool marble twilight of the Metropolitan, making bad 

 Prev. P 18/169 next